


Look Homeward

by inlovewithnight



Category: Friday Night Lights
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-10
Updated: 2010-02-10
Packaged: 2017-10-07 04:10:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/61285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Written for the Picfor1000 challenge (write a fic of exactly 1000 words prompted by a picture).  Backstory written in-canon, subsequently contradicted by canon.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Look Homeward

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Picfor1000 challenge (write a fic of exactly 1000 words prompted by a picture). Backstory written in-canon, subsequently contradicted by canon.

Annie Blakeney became Annie Saracen when she was nineteen, six days past her birthday. She gave birth to her baby boy two weeks before her first anniversary.

It wasn't that she didn't love Henry, because she did, and it wasn't that she didn't want to have a baby, because she did. Those were the kinds of facts that had a tendency to get twisted up and changed in the retelling, or dropped altogether when it came to explaining to Matt where he came from and why his mama left. But those things weren't the problem.

It wasn't that she didn't love, and it wasn't that she didn't want. It wasn't either of those at all.  
**  
They lived in base housing, boxy and efficient and square. Matt remembers that she bought things in bright colors, gaudy as cartoons, because that drew lines between what the Army gave and what she chose.

Memories from childhood are always scattered like broken glass across the floor, never quite fitting together. He remembers her dancing in the kitchens of those solemn little houses, snapping her fingers and shaking her hips to the tinny sound of country radio through cheap speakers. Sometimes he sat on the floor and looked up at her, laughing and clapping his hands, and sometimes she scooped him up and held him, and he would rest his head over her heart while she sang along. Garth Brooks and Clint Black, true love and cheating hearts, and he never listens to anything like that anymore, half because none of it's any good and half because it makes his chest hurt to hear it, the whine of guitars and the endless promises to stay forever and never leave.

He remembers lying on his back on the couch howling at the top of his lungs, his mother standing over him and crying just as hard, Grandma frowning at them both and then slipping her arm around his mother's waist, guiding her to the old refrigerator and pressing the bottle of sick-sweet pink liquid into her hand, telling her to give him his medicine and he'd quiet down, he'd calm down, he'd feel better.

"I can't do this," his mother said, and he knows he probably doesn't really remember this part, he's probably putting it together from TV and movies and just knowing how things go, how people tend to act. He knows they came to visit Grandma in Dillon lots, he knows that the kind of medicine you give kids is bright pink and stays in the refrigerator, he knows he got sick a lot when he was little because Grandma tells him so now, when she can't remember how old he is half the time. The details don't matter, but they're the parts he can't get out of his head, even if he is making them up.

"It's too hard," he thinks maybe she said. "Taking care of him is too hard."  
**  
She should call him, probably. She tries to do it, on Christmas or his birthday, or after she talks to her sister who still lives in the same town as Henry's sister and who doesn't think it's right, going off and leaving your kid behind, even if he is in a good town and with a woman who loves him like breathing. He's better off anyway, without her and the low twist of unhappiness she carries around in her heart.

"Kids don't notice that, Annie," her sister tells her, short and pissed-off and impatient over the phone. "Kids notice that their mom took off and left them."

She tries to call, and sometimes they talk. Sometimes she hangs up before it stops ringing, and sometimes Lorraine answers and the words dry up in her mouth, but sometimes they talk. He sounds like a good kid. She thinks she'd like him.  
**  
This house, beat-up on a flat lot on a quiet street in Dillon, he's spent more time here than anywhere. They came here the summer he was six; he remembers that because he sat on the couch between his mom and his grandma and watched the Olympics. Didn't understand them, but he watched them.

His mom kissed him on the head and left, and he stayed there for a little while. He never asks about it now, but it was probably a couple of months. He probably started school in Dillon, even though he doesn't remember it. Probably got knocked down on the playground and sat on by Tim Riggins. But she came back again and got him and they went off to more base housing, maybe New Mexico that time. Hard to say.

She dyed her hair different colors, dark brown or movie-star red and once, bright blue, which made them both laugh until she started to cry. He shies away from remembering that too much, but it's the kind of thing that lingers.

She started smoking, too, and he still looks up when he hears the click-hiss of a lighter. Can't help it. Can't help but hope.  
**  
Two weeks after Matt turned eleven, Annie put him in the car and drove him to Dillon. If he noticed that this time she'd packed up all of his stuff, he didn't say it. Just sat quiet and watched her, like always. He was a quiet kid. A good kid.

She took him to Lorraine's house and gave her a letter to send to Henry. She went back to Oklahoma. There was a chance she could find some of the spaces she'd fallen through, there, she thought.

"I love you, you know that?" she tells him on the phone, once when she gets through.

"Yes ma'am," he says, and that's Henry's voice, his father in him.

"I really do, Matt," she says, wondering what he looks like now, wondering who he's turning into. "I love you."

"I know," he says softly, and his voice catches a little, and she has to hang up before she hears him cry.


End file.
